Having run the numbers, environmentalist Michael Shellenberger said in Pandora’s Promise: “I ended up feeling like a sucker. The idea that we’re going to replace oil and natural gas with solar and wind, and nothing else, is a hallucinatory delusion.”This position has a powerful ally in Dr James Hansen of Nasa who has consistently urged a radical decarbonisation of global energy supplies as our last shot at averting catastrophic climate change. While strongly supporting renewables, he adds: “It is not feasible in the foreseeable future to phase out coal unless nuclear power is included in the energy mix.”A Nasa paper published in April pointed out that some 1.8 million lives have already been saved globally in recent decades where nuclear power has replaced fossil fuels. Ironically, fly ash produced by a coal-burning plant like Moneypoint in Co Clare emits some 100 times more radiation than a similar-sized nuclear power plant. Globally, some 3,500 people a day, many aged under five, die as a result of breathing air contaminated by fossil fuel burning.The ongoing gross misrepresentation of the risks and benefits of nuclear energy as a power source has perhaps been the single greatest factor stymying the development of “next generation” technologies, including molten salt and pebble bed reactors that offer more efficient and much safer alternatives.

...

Famed environmentalist Bill McKibben accepts that nuclear must be part of any serious push towards zero-carbon, but admits being reluctant to say so in public as “it would split this movement”. And that is the nub of the matter. Environmentalists have done such a thorough job of demonising nuclear energy that many now feel unable to retreat from these positions without serious loss of face.The roots of this hostility go back to the Cold War, where the environmental and anti-war movements converged in opposing nuclear weapons. That battle is largely over, but humanity’s deadliest foe is now CO2. New threats will not be vanquished by repeating old slogans.